By DINITIA SMITH

Published: March 18, 1998

By the winter of 1922, Franz Kafka was a figure pitiful in his suffering. He had tuberculosis, boils, hemorrhoids and headaches. But there was also something distinctly modern about this writer's pain, in the neurotic way it emanated from his unquiet spirit. His circumstances were for the most part comfortable. He was from an assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Prague. He had a law degree. But so great was his inner turmoil that he could not bear loud voices or to eat in front of others. And it was because of his own hesitations that his love relationships, with Felice Bauer, with Julie Wohryzek, with Milena Jesenska-Polak, had failed.

''Impossible to sleep, impossible to stay awake, impossible to endure life,'' Kafka wrote in his diary on Jan. 16. Hoping for respite, he went to a ski resort in Spindelmuhle, near the Polish border. ''My situation in this world would seem to be a dreadful one, alone here,'' he wrote on Jan. 29, ''on a forsaken road, moreover, without an earthly goal.''

It was there he began to write what would be his last novel, ''The Castle,'' set in a snowy landscape reminiscent of Spindelmuhle. K., a surveyor, arrives one night at a village at the foot of a hilltop castle, thinking he has been hired by the count who inhabits it. But no orders have been given, and K. spends the novel trying to see the count, encountering a series of phantasmagoric nonevents that end in his failure to see him.

In 1924, Kafka died at the age of 40, with instructions to his friend Max Brod to burn his writings. But Brod saved them and assembled them for publication. Brod's compilation provided the matrix for translations into English by Edwin and Willa Muir. But the text and the translations have long been the subject of disagreement among scholars.

This month, Schocken Books will bring out a new translation of ''The Castle,'' by Mark Harman. It is the first volume in a vast retranslation of Kafka's novels, diaries (including previously expurgated sections) and correspondence. The new work is based on a fresh compilation of the manuscripts by Sir Malcolm Pasley, a scholar at Oxford University. And it shows a modernist Kafka, a precursor of Beckett, colloquial, even playful. For Mr. Harman, the work is also an expression of Kafka's increasing preoccupation with his Jewishness.

''This is the authentic Kafka,'' said Arthur Samuelson, the editorial director of Schocken, ''It will undo all of what Max Brod did.''

The second volume in the series, ''The Trial,'' translated by Breon Mitchell, is expected in September. And a series of related events and panel discussions is under way this month.

Kafka was born in 1883, a German-speaking Jew, in Prague. His father, Hermann, was a driven man, given to vulgarisms, constantly critical of his only son, a shy boy with sad, dark eyes who was terrified of him. Later, in his accusing work, ''Letter to His Father,'' Kafka encapsulated his feelings about his father: ''One night I kept constantly whimpering for water,'' Kafka wrote. ''When repeated and emphatic threats failed to work, you snatched me out of my bed, carried me out onto the balcony and left me there alone for a while in my nightgown, with the door locked.''

For years after, Kafka wrote, ''I kept being haunted by fantasies of this giant of a man, my father, the ultimate judge, coming to get me in the middle of the night,'' making him feel, like absolutely Nothing.''

Kafka attended an elite German-speaking school, earned a law degree at the German University in Prague and eventually went to work in the Statistical and Claims Department of the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia.

In 1912, he was forced to take over the family asbestos factory. By then, so taxed was he by the drudgery of his work, and his symbiotic relationship with his parents, with whom he lived for most of his adult life, that he contemplated suicide.

But all through this, in order to save himself from going mad, Kafka worked on his writing. There was ''Metamorphosis,'' his tale of Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to find himself turned into a giant insect, ''A Country Doctor,'' ''Amerika,'' ''The Trial,'' ''In the Penal Colony,'' ''A Hunger Artist.''

In 1923, Kafka met Dora Diamant and moved with her to Berlin. Together they dreamed of opening a restaurant in Palestine. Dora would be the cook, Kafka the waiter. He died of tuberculosis the next year.

Words Removed, Punctuation Added

In assembling the text for ''The Castle,'' Max Brod broke up Kafka's long paragraphs into smaller sections -- added standard High German punctuation, inserting semicolons, breaking up sentences -- and changed Kafka's demarcation of the chapters. Originally, Kafka had ended his novel in the middle of a sentence. But Brod created a new ending at the close of Chapter 20, omitting a fifth of Kafka's original text, so that the novel ended with a conversation between K. and his landlady. The omitted material was added as an appendix to a later edition.